'Oracles and Obsessions' deals with the idea that making a work of art can be compared to performing an act of magic; a method of influencing and (re)shaping stubborn reality. Driven by urges and desires, a work of art materializes, changing, in big or small ways, the world around us. Drawing comparison between Oracles of ancient times, artists nowadays form a connection between an inner world with an outer world.

Koes Staassen has selected the invited artists, who are predominantly queer and/or female, because he feels a strong connection with them and their work.

Invited artists are:

Elijah Burgher

Elijah Burgher’s artwork indoctrinates viewers into a mystical cult of queer sexual energies. He produces small colored pencil drawings, as well as paintings of sigils on large canvas drop cloths. Burgher utilizes ideas from magick and the occult to address sexuality, sub-cultural formation and the history of abstraction.

Kinke Kooi

Kinke Kooi believes in the power of subtlety. Subtlety becomes significant when you zoom in. That’s why she does not have problems with visualizing feelings like God, not knowing, amazement, soul, and the strange urge to feel in a new way about man and woman.

Fabio de Meo

Arising and developing in a non-stop process of addition and negation, the work of Fabio de Meo discloses a strong connection between the spirituality of gesture and the polymateric construction of the image. Both the overlapping coats and the steps of composition induce the infinite variations with which the viewer can gather the entirety, thus recognizing, in its silent, evocative, strength, a crystalized image.

Tom de Pekin

As an activist, artist, graphic designer, and film director, Tom de Pekin is interested in the relationship between words and images, making graphic diversions in an erotic and playful manner. His films are an extension of his graphic work in a different medium, be it a cartoon or a film staging living performers.

Timothy Phillips

Timothy Phillips’ practice at large is informed in part by his ongoing personal interpretations and re-contextualisations of various European aesthetic traditions. He is driven by a question of the functions and uses of such traditions to a queer life lived in Australian suburbia.

Sam Samiee

In his work, Samiee focusses on the practice of painting and research in history or philosophy, Persian literature, the history of painting and psychoanalysis.

Characteristic of his work is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas.

Johanna Schweizer

Johanna Schweizer’s fiber sculptures are both profound and witty. They refer to a wide array of themes, from gender and pomosexuality to religion, folklore, paganism and fairy tales, – the sensually playful and the deadly serious going hand in hand.

Koes Staassen

Koes Staassen’s intricate drawings confront viewers with their desires. Both the beauty that lies in desiring and the threat that always lingers beneath the surface are placed together in carefully constructed still lives.

Astrit Ismaili

During the one to one eye gazing session Astrit Ismaili voices imagined images using language like; improvised poetry, story telling or songs. Each session is unique and the duration depends on the capacity of the shared energy between the performer and the audience member.